Five Silicon Valley companies fought release of employment data, and won

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"But many of their industry peers see the issue differently. The
Mercury News initially set out to obtain race and gender data on
the valley's 15 largest companies, and nine — including
Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay, AMD, Sanmina and Sun Microsystems
— agreed to allow the U.S. Department of Labor to provide
it.

""There's nothing to hide, in our view," said Chuck Mulloy, a
spokesman for Intel, which contacted the Mercury News to share its
employment data after learning of the newspaper's federal FOIA
request filed in early 2008. "We just felt that we're very proud of
the (diversity) programs we have in place and the efforts we put
forth, and we don't have any trouble sharing it."

"Experts in the area of equal employment law scoffed at the idea
that public disclosure of race and gender data — for example,
the number of black men or Asian women in job categories such as
"professionals," "officials & managers" and "service workers"
— could really allow competitors to discern a big tech
company's business strategy. A bigger issue, they said, is the
social cost of allowing large, influential corporations to hide
their race and gender data."

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